The Graphics update was unnecessary

[Rudje]

I do think that a graphical upgrade was needed, contrary to popular belief, I'm sure. But what we got is questionable at best.

First of all, people consistently struggle to see the difference between old and new, they get it mixed up. For characters, old often looks better to people. It is easy to convince an outsider that old is new and vice versa. A graphical upgrade of this caliber should be an obvious improvement. I think it is hard to justify the increased system requirements for such little gain.

For the environment I felt more "wow" seeing this game with a reshade that with the upgrade. The old graphics struggle with desaturated colors and low contrast, the new improves on that, but compared to simply using nvidia shader settings, the hit to performance isn't worth it.

Characters are more high resolution across the board, but at the cost of their integrity, and honestly nothing about it looks impressive from an artistic point. I'm very disappointed, I don't think this is up to par for Square Enix or Final Fantasy quality at all. It appears rushed and poorly planned.

I also fear the worst is yet to come if these issues are not addressed before launch (and I doubt they will).

This, functionally, is also how I feel. The environmental upgrades are purely upgrades, the closest I had to doubt over them was some small pang of loss at biodiversity in the plants (less height/color variance, mostly), which is a small detail and one that might not hold fruit in the game proper across more areas. The character changes are baffling, with most being sidegrades or even outright downgrades depending on the face. Some of the changes are even worse than certain earlier previews, which looked just fine to outright great with a couple of pain points that were already being pointed out even then but were not changed to accommodate the feedback. And even with the benchmark releasing early enough that some assets are obviously unfinished, I still dread the thought of what it would take to actually change them with this little time, or the final state of release.

It's especially baffling given that some of the worst-impacted faces are some of the newest. Those should have required the least reworking!